Notes from the Culture Bunker: Those Critics That Hate Inception? Wrong. So Very, Very Wrong.

If the pockets of resistance in Critland to Christopher Nolan’s Inception sound a mite querulous to you, one likely explanation is that some reviewers will never forgive Nolan for The Dark Knight’s fanboys. That bozo constituency tired me out, too. Unappeased by the mostly favorable reviews that added lagniappe to the movie’s humongous 2008 box office, they went Second Amendment all over the Interwebs whenever anyone—not just their peers, but the world at large—called The Dark Knight anything less than The Greatest Movie Ever. Sue me for being reminded of how often the patriots most likely to brag up our own slaphappy U.S.A. as the greatest country since time’s dawn turn out to be comparing it to a long-ago trip to Vancouver and something they heard once about Tijuana.

Not that it’ll satisfy the crazies, but I thought The Dark Knight was pretty good myself. On top of the smart revisionism crystallized by calling Batman "the" Batman in its brand-rebooting predecessor, it had provocative Bush-era subtext to burn and a few ace performances. Betcha anything that in a decade we talk as much or even more about Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne than we do now about Heath Ledger’s Joker, and that’s no knock at Ledger. True, Nolan’s big action showpieces looked like goulash to those of us cranky enough to crave intelligible data about who’s where, what’s threatening them and which actions will affect the plot. But that movie had vibe, and vibe in a brand-name pop spectacle makes up for a lot. If it’s lost some in hindsight, that’s only because Inception is so much better.

No matter how brainy they looked up against the dunderheaded competition, both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were Nolan in franchise mode. Thanks to their megabucks success Inception gives us our best chance yet to see what the guy who thought up Memento can do with big stars, a summer-blockbuster budget and a 2:28 running time when the concept originates in his own fertile mind. Granted, with assists galore from Fantastic Voyage, The Matrix, Blade Runner, Solaris, the TV version of Mission: Impossible, a whole bunch of graphic novels and even stray bits of The Sting, but that’s how it works these days. Somewhere, Charlie Kaufman is either beaming with avuncular pride or mumbling curses at his Oscar.

It’s one thing for Kaufman to play nesting-doll games with memory, fantasy, burned bridges to nowhere and layers of illusion. Even when his sources are pop-derived, his movies will never reach a huge audience. For Nolan to achieve something nearly as artful and just as engrossing in a thrill-ride I-be-dog No. 1 box-office hit starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a brain-circuit commando leading his crack team of forgers, dreamscape designers and masters of disguise on a mission to implant a false idea in their target’s subconscious is, culturally speaking, a very different kind of event.

The problem with comparing Inception to a video game, which is pretty unavoidable, is that even people who should know better are conditioned to assume said comparison is pejorative. It isn’t if I’m the guy making it, at least not in this case. It’s not just that the movie’s imaginary realms are designed to resemble video-game levels; the links among them and the surprises in each are involving—not just as a puzzle to solve, but emotionally—in a similarly quasi-participatory way. Despite the not unreasonable objection that the goings-on in Inception don’t remotely resemble the way actual dreaming works—and thank God, say I, since the indecipherability of real dreams to anyone but the dreamer is a conundrum that only a few directors (Luis Bu&#xF1;uel, David Lynch and David Cronenberg, for three) have ever solved—some of the movie’s postulates are evocative all the same. My favorite is the notion that projections of the dreamer’s authentic unconscious will recognize and attack an intruder like antibodies going after an infection, a gag that’s funniest when it first appears and we don’t yet know the explanation.

Unsurprisingly, Nolan is at his worst when he’s staging action he doesn’t care about to keep the movie’s thrill-ride side going, with the most gratuitous offender being the snowbound-fortress shootouts that dominate one level. Since the parkas and goggles everybody is wearing make it well-nigh impossible to keep track of who’s who or how their actions relate to what’s underway at the other levels, whatever’s supposed to be happening is even harder to follow or care about than The Dark Knight’s big chase scene. What makes up for such glitches are the eerie wonders of "Where did that come from?" images like Paris folding up on itself, origami-style, or a rope-bundled batch of comatose dreamers being towed like firewood through a fantasy hotelscape gone gravity-free.

Unlike most directors working in fantasy genres—and Tim Burton does kind of leap to mind—Nolan has always taken an old-fashioned interest in personalities and diverting character bits, adding a welcome dose of Hollywood classicism to his more newfangled moves. On top of his terrific use of Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy as, respectively, the plot’s instigator and its target, he finds room to let Ellen Page grow on us (wonders never cease) and for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to add deft notes of irresistibly poker-faced comedy to what initially looks like a routine sidekick role. Above all, you can’t help being grateful to Nolan for how much livelier DiCaprio is here than he was in a somewhat comparable role in Martin Scorsese’s much more lugubrious Shutter Island just months back. If you’ve gotten fed up with the fist-faced, inexpressive glower he equates with integrity, it’s a treat to see him acting like a movie star for once.

Several critics I generally think the world of have been either huffy or derisive about Inception not being as, y’know, deep as it purports to be. But first off, I’m not sure it purports to be: It’s high-octane entertainment first and foremost, and only a fanboy would think the meaning of life is contained therein. Second, my colleagues’ counter-citations of flicks they think are philosophically challenging make me want to groan. Maybe it’s my loss and we’ll just have to blame my temperament and/or Philistinism, but most "visionary" projections of higher planes of knowledge than plain old human consciousness strike me as fatuous by definition. In practice, 2001: A Space Odyssey—the granddaddy of them all—comes down to imagining the happy day when we’ll all be as smart as Stanley Kubrick, and that just isn’t an aspiration I’ve ever found appealing. Maybe that’s why, beyond the sheer kinetic beauty of the characters’ successive "rebirths" as they explode back up through the layers of the dream at the climax, what I dig most about Inception is that Nolan’s definition of the pinnacle of awareness is simply waking up in the real world again—on a literal plane headed for Los Angeles, not a figurative one bound for some bearded cluck’s idea of profundity.

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